Reference GeForce 6800 Ultra 512MB
NVIDIA did have the new 512MB GeForce 6800 Ultra reference boards on hand though, which are soon going on sale through a few board vendors. Although the layout of the 6800 boards appear to have been designed to support 512MB memory in the first place the board design did need changing from the 256MB variants, presumably because of the extra power requirements of the extra 256MB of RAM.
AGP 6200 & 6600
Although NVIDIA have recently announced NV44A, which brings 6200 natively to AGP, we did also catch a look at 6200 and 6600 for AGP using the HIS bridge chip. Both these boards feature a different design to the AGP 6600 GT, which has its core rotated anti-clockwise slightly, and instead uses a longer PCB with the graphics core positioned slightly backwards. Presumably such an arrangement, although creating a larger board, ends up in fewer layers this resulting in a cheaper board to manufacture.
GigaByte & ASUS Single Board 6600 GT SLI's
ASUS Extreme N6800Ultra Dual
Board vendors are now increasingly playing with the SLI capabilities of NVIDIA’s graphics chips and putting them on a single board. Following GigaBtye’s GV-3D1, ASUS and more recently LeadTek have placed two 6600 GT’s on a single board for increased single board performance via SLI. ASUS have also begun to experiment a little further by creating a design with two 6800 Ultra’s on a single, very large, PCB - the image above gives shows an unpopulated PCB with the heatsink on.
As with ATI’s solutions there were increasingly large numbers of different cooling solutions on display for NVIDIA cards with some passive cooling solutions stretching up to 6800 GT levels. The GigaByte 6800 GT board above is one alternative cooling solution that uses heat-pipes to transfer the heat from the core to the underside of the core where the fan is placed.
